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Apocalypse Right Now

While everyone was looking for a new anthem for the then-upcoming attack on Afghanistan, I renewed my faith in my all-time favorite (anti-)war film. Until recently, it continued to screen at the Sony Metreon IMAX theater, even after Sept. 11 when the studios withdrew their violent flicks from release and stopped promoting too-close-to-wartime-reality-for-comfort TV shows such as HBO’s A Band of Brothers. It’s Apocalypse Now Redux.

Why is the 22-year-old film, albeit with 49 more minutes of previously unseen footage, worth viewing? We know Martin Sheen as the benevolent president of West Wing, not the maddened Captain Willard of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Brown Sugar is no longer on Top 40 radio. And the Vietnam War seems lifetimes ago.

Still, Apocalypse Now, redux version or not, is as relevant as ever. As I write, news headlines edge out across my computer screen on ticker tape, announcing that Taliban gunmen are firing on planes over Kabul, and it seems like the right time to muse on a war against an evasive enemy that once was an ally and now only seems to reflect our shadow selves. Now more than ever, the film’s antiwar statement remains one of the most powerful on film, even after more recent attempts to supplant its status by Three Kings and Thin Red Line. Its poetry still resonates.

There are the new scenes, which were meticulously added by Coppola and award-winning Bay Area editor and sound designer Walter Murch. Now, Captain Willard and his boat crew of all-American stoners, hipsters and stoics steal the surfboard of the grandiose, comic Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall). It’s a great addition: Willard comes off as more good-humored, less passive and more expansive, which helps because the character so often gets upstaged by Kilgore, who seems to get all the best lines: “Charlie don’t surf.” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

The late Bay Area concert promoter Bill Graham also seems to loom larger in Redux. He pops out of the chaos as the Playboy Bunnies are airdropped into a surreal USO performance, and he plays a pivotal part in new scenes that recast the concert promoter as a pimp when the Bunnies’ copter crashes and the women are prostituted to Willard’s boat crew in exchange for fuel. In the simultaneously creepy, funny and sad footage, these otherwise idealized women turn out to be quirky, exploited individuals who are as damaged by their war experience as the men.

Other scenes have been stitched into the original film to offer more historical context. Toward the end of Redux, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) flips through Time magazine, complaining about the media circus he left behind, which is humorous perhaps because that reasoning has become so clichéd.

The new, much-vaunted French plantation scenes, however, should have been left on the editing-room floor. Set in a plantation deep in the jungle and peopled by armed Gallic colonialists dressed in white and tennis togs, the scenesÇ with murky and muddled dialogue about the French connection in Vietnam, are not only deceptive (the French may have had more history in Vietnam, but they also had just as little right as the Americans to be there) but drawn out, unnatural and marred by a sentimental electronic score during the romantic scenes between Willard and a French widow (Aurore Clement). Admittedly these additions ground the film more specifically in Vietnam, rather than some mythological country, but at the same time, their very premise seems laughably unrealistic and contrived.

Some of the additions work, others don’t and as the final moments unreeled, I also found myself feeling a little nostalgic for the original version, which now seems lean, mean and relatively focused even at 150 minutes. Redux made me realize what an amazing editing job had been done in the first place.

I was also struck by the scenes of Vietnamese life. Much has been made of the film’s lack of central Vietnamese characters and the presence of Kurtz’s screwed-up and symbolic savage followers at the end, figures that appear to be the product of Coppola’s dark imaginings while filming the movie in the Philippines. With that in mind, I was still surprised.

When I first saw the film, close to when it was first released, the entire audience was transfixed by the exhilarating action scenes toward the start of the film, as Kilgore’s copters transport the Willard gang to the entrance of the river to the strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie. At the time, I barely registered the scenes of women running with children before the copter attacks, people making their way across bridges and jumping into the water while divebombed by Kilgore’s company.

Now these scenes amaze me because the Vietnamese people look so real. They are humans rather than computer-generated images. They have the same living, breathing texture of realism as the action scenes, which were staged without the CGI special effects movies now rely on.

In the first part of Apocalypse Now, the Vietnamese are far from evil figures, particularly in the scene in which the Willard’s posse stop a boat of innocent villagers and mow them down after a girl runs for a puppy. That scene is still as heartbreaking as it ever was. Of course the reasonable depiction of the Vietnamese people changes at the end, when all tethers to reality are dropped out the window and you enter a fantasy killing field that, interestingly, revolves around Colonel Kurtz rather than the Viet Cong. You have to somehow reconcile this grim delusional vision of Southeast Asian people and of Americans “gone native,” with the scenes at the start of Redux.

And you somehow have to reconcile this film with all our visions, our mental moving pictures of war, that came after its 1979 original release. Those are shaped by Apocalypse Now as it in turn was shaped by Heart of Darkness. Is Osama Bin Laden our Kurtz? Are we denying the twisted logic of his ties to us? Are we making the mistake of thinking that we can destroy him and escape unscathed, untouched and unaltered? Some stories are worth revisiting, if not re-envisioning.